Review Summary:

When it comes to staying in touch with your friends and family, many are now choosing to use one of those free services which support text messages and voice/video calling. There are a lot of services which are completely free (at least with their basic accounts), and some of the most popular ones are: FaceTime and iMessage (Apple’s own solution), Skype, WhatsApp, LINE, Viber, and many more. Even though all of these services are very popular in certain markets, the battle between those is very rough and it seems that it takes only a few weeks until a new major update is being issued.

In today’s article we are going to take a look at LINE for OSX, which was just recently published. This is a free service which originates from Japan, and its mobile apps are among the most popular applications on almost every mobile platform. Since its main competitors already published their own OSX editions, LINE simply followed the lead which made happy many of its millions of users. Now let’s see what this application offers and do you need to choose this service instead of any of those I’ve mentioned before.

LINE could be found in the OSX App Store, and it’s completely free to download and use. Once I opened it for the first time I immediately saw a problem. As it turns out this application doesn’t allow me to sign-up for a new account, and instead tells me that I need to use a mobile app. I understand that it needs to verify my mobile phone number in order to work, but this doesn’t prevent any other service from making a new sign-up incredibly simple and easy. With LINE this is not the case.

After you’ve signed-in you’ll be greeted by the main window where you will be able to see your contacts, groups, and messages as well. Once you start chatting with someone things will run very smoothly, and I’ve had no problems with this part of LINE. Messages, phone calls, and file transfers all went seamless. When it comes to anything more complex, this application failed once again.

One of the big problems with LINE for OSX is that it seems like a stripped version of its iOS counterpart. For example, you won’t be able to choose a wallpaper or any other kind of customization, and you won’t be able to see read receipts as well. Another big disappointment is completely broken notification system. As it turns out, LINE uses its own notification system so you need to keep this app open at all times to receive push messages. Even if you keep it open, it will usually fail to notify you of a new message, or it will notify you only when a new conversation is being started. This means that all existing conversations won’t receive push messages, which makes this whole system obsolete.

LINE for iOS is a decent messaging application which is actually very popular. Sadly, its OSX counterpart seems unusable at all fronts. It actually doesn’t seem even like a beta version, so there’s a lot of issues that need to be solved in for this application to become reliable and useful.

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